


Conviction

by strigiforme



Series: Conviction [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: ARR, Adventure, Assassination, Coerthas, Dragons, Heavensward, Murder, Mystery, North, OC, The Twelve - Freeform, ff14 - Freeform, ffxiv - Freeform, halone, ishgard, the Fury - Freeform, the convictory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28212804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strigiforme/pseuds/strigiforme
Summary: Father Sanson is an ordinary man of the cloth who spends his time as little more than a pious coinkeep, relegated to managing his parish's finances. As part of his duties, he is the accountant for sins bought and sold, but his parishioners are simple folk who pay a pittance for gossip and the occasional theft of a neighbor's borrowed dish. Everything changes when a woman haunted by death begs an indulgence that threatens to upend his faith and force him to reconsider the lengths he will go to, the measures he will overlook to keep his church strong.
Series: Conviction [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2066700





	1. Chapter 1

The whipping winds raced across the battered snowscape, all hounds of winter searching out the smallest crooks and crevices and promptly muffling the jagged mouths with a spray of white powder. The highlands hadn’t known warmth in half a decade, but its stalwart denizens remained unfazed, found ways to move with the breakneck turn of climate. A throng of wooly folk gathered close around a sputtering fire and thawed their ice-caked gloves until they could be summarily peeled from hands beaten ruddy even well-hidden in shearling. A clever hand exchanged a flask around, red cheeks peeking up from cloak wraps and tipping back to warm their insides on hooch brewed strong enough to resist freezing on all but the most blisteringly cold nights.

“Thought we’d never get back when the clouds started rolling up…but I have to admit, fellas, death weren’t lookin’ so bad when I knew I had seven hells to warm up in on the other side!”

Laughter pierced the suppressive cloak of an impending blizzard from where they nestled at the foot of a steep and rocky valley, hardened people who eased the frigid wastes with laughter and back-slapping that nearly sent the smallest of the throng sprawling face-first onto the ground. They stomped their boots and whistled at the weather, cleared space to start a fire, and in no time at all turned an inhospitable pile of stone into a passable place to wait for the worst of it to blow over.

“I tell you, Ragnheidur is out there yet, and I intend to claim her head to match the tail mounted on my cabin wall!”

“For the sake of the newcomer, why don’t you tell him how many times you’ve changed that story since I heard you tell it first, what, ten? Fifteen years ago?”

“Everyone knows the tail you’ve got mounted belongs to some lesser lizard, old man!”

The resident storyteller waves them all off with a sweep of his hand and focuses every ounce of aged charisma toward the most fresh-faced of the grizzled lot, daring the younger man to look away from his intense, over-earnest expression. “Don’t listen to these sour pricks, son, they just don’t know what to make of old men who ain’t yet hung up their big ambitions. This lot thinks that when they get to be my age, they’ll be content to fade away in some rocking chair until Death comes to collect. A load of shite, you hear me? That big bitch has a target painted on her ugly head and I’m keen on collecting.” He punctuated his proclamation with a spirited thump of his padded chest, eliciting a round of guffaws from his audience.

“You don’t have to comfort him, Pietor. He’s quite clearly lost his marbles half an age ago and anything left froze out here! Don’t let him drag you under with him.”

The young man now identified as Pietor offered a gamely smile, visibly more reserved than his raucous comrades, but before he could get a word in edgewise, the storyteller heaved a great arm about his shoulders and dragged him to his side. “They’ve been trying to paint me as a mad old fool, but you take a look around you, boy,” and the young man did indeed do that, “And you tell me if you think anyone who comes to the godsdamned Convictory hasn’t had their gourd knocked around a few times before!”

The camp erupted in spirited shouting that never quite ceased even as the last tender flames of daylight receded swiftly into a deep and brumal night with precious little in-between. Their clever hideaway was spared the worst of the drifting snow, but even the heartiest of them eventually retreated one by one into their respective tents when the booze could no longer prop them up against the climate and settled down for the evening, leaving only Pietor perched next to the fire as the first watchman of the night.

An iron ring haloed his boyish face, the kind that looks half his true age at all times even from a mile away, and he was not inclined to correct anyone on the matter. His notice turned upward, well past the broken teeth of stony peaks to where the stars winked blithely as tempestuous clouds began to break apart and yield to clear, crisp winter skies. The tilt of his chin revealed a stretch of tender neck to the brisk breeze, but for the moment he seemed perfectly content to be wrapped in the veil of night under foreign skies, a stranger until before long, he would not be.

_May my bolts be as gifts to these wicked hearts._

When his eyes slid shut, was it home he was dreaming of? Not simply a place of residence or an origin point, but of another life and another _him_ all together. In the margins of this newer, humbler existence, he could still feel the haunt of who he’d been reminding him that there was a time when he’d been ferocious, a panther who could still smell the blood of a fresh kill from inside his concrete cage. The phantom of old claws extended and retracted.

_Sever the spirit that pilots his innocent flesh and deliver it unto our Lady of Fury, and may her righteous fire cleanse it whole.  
_

A low _chunk_ was lost to the dying gasps of the passing storm. He couldn’t have been surprised.

–

“W-whoa—hey… _Hey!_ Wake up! Wake up!”

“What the hell’s the matter, Haften?”

“Something’s not—This isn’t right! This isn’t right, something’s happened to Pietor…”

“What? Godsdamnit, where are my…”

“Pietor? Shit.”

“Hang on, dammit, I’m coming…”

“Oh, hell. The boy’s dead.”

Fine snow dotted the young man’s eyelashes, an empty gaze now permanently fixed skyward. One hand had fallen limp at his throat, where the wooden shaft of a crossbow bolt thrusted proudly outward from its lethal mark. All eyes shot to the canyon walls, but the clarity now granted by fairer skies gave no indication of threat in their midst. Baffled hunters rummaged through pockets and travel packs, but whoever Pietor had been before joining a band that never asked too much, clearly that man did not want to be found. Not a letter or a token of sentiment to give answers to such a swift and absolute act.

By morning, a solemn line trudged slowly away from camp and its new, lone occupant, barely a wink of sleep between them.

“You think he might have been an Imperial or summat?”

“If he was, then he’ll be some beast’s meal and then some beast’s shite soon enough.”

“Never liked him much anyway.”


	2. Lenience

Father Sanson rubbed the edge of the parchment between his fingers until the corners began to yield and curl. A cloaked woman gusted through his office door not two minutes prior, bringing a bitter evening chill that stirred embers in the hearth and roused rebellious flames fed on fresh air. The snow-spackled wraith had then extended a folded note on steady fingers and he was helpless but to rise with a wooden creak and accept the burden of this cold messenger without so much as a _hello_.

“You can’t afford this,” he finally declared, lifting his chin to meet her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“You were kind enough to give me a grace period for the last,” she retorted softly, belying a kind of patience that he wished wasn’t so. It would have been far easier to evict anger and belligerence than this muted sorrow.

“I’m a priest, not a debtor.” He dropped the paper to the desk as though it were a written curse and urged it back the way it came with three fingers. “Please, my lady. This is much too expensive, and I don’t want to imagine where or how you came up with the coin the last you were here.”

“Let the matter of my finances fall to me, Father. Pray for me either to burn or to learn, if you like, but I ask that you do not deny me this.”

His gut churned sour with her insistence. He had been little more than a religious accountant before her arrival, keeping the books on sins no larger than unkindness or petty theft of cookware on loan from neighbors. It was twice now in the span of a moon that this scarecrow of a woman had shambled in and forced him to bring out the moral scales and weigh the blood spilled, ounce for ounce, in order to write an invoice that would ultimately forgive the unforgiveable. Even one time was too many.

“I thought against my better senses that it would be the only request of its kind,” he fretted, allowing the dissonance to crack his stern countenance. “I looked into your heart and saw a woman wounded, one who could perhaps find a sense of closure if she were allowed a single slip…”

“You saw me correctly, Father.”

“Then tell me why you’ve returned to beg another indulgence of this kind. You place a terrible burden on my shoulders, you must know this.” The pause she gave was enough to offer him hope that a change of course was still possible, that she might have been moved so much as an inch by his sincerity. For good measure, he added, “You have an abundance of life left to live. This is no way to spend it.”

With a single shake of her head, his hopes were shattered. “It awakened in me a desire to see the work finished more thoroughly. I have no life to live so long as these debts owed to me remain outstanding, but I can’t collect them without your blessing. You are the only one who can give me this.”

The temperate priest, in absence of a reply, merely adjusted his collar with a fixed frown. There was nothing in the polity that accounted for such a situation, nobody who had prepared him to consider the will of the divine on such wrenching terms. He had turned to the flail in an attempt to seek divine clarity after her first visit left him robbed of good conscience, and the phantom lashes still flared hotly over the muscle and sinew in a haunting reminder. His hands clasped together tightly at his front and he was forced to avert his gaze as his thoughts overtook all else present. Mercifully, her eyes granted him reprieve by gazing past his silhouette to the blackened tea kettle suspended over flames. Snow melted off her furs in slow drip, plinking dully against the faded rug underfoot. Ambient nightsong of northern winds and a sign beating fruitlessly against the side of the building made for a bitter drumbeat to drive their stalemate.

“Father,” she eventually offered with sudden, disarming tenderness. He was forced to meet her gaze once more with a distrustful flick. “Put some tea on that fire and let me thaw my boots. By the time I’m warm again, you’ll know everything. You can make your decision then.” She smiled timidly, as though her mouth were also slowly shedding the ice gathered there. “What do you say?”


	3. The Interview

The staccato tapping of a solid steel inkpen against the desk was beginning to wear on the good Father’s patience, but judging by the young woman’s insistence on keeping up the prim flicks of her wrist for nigh an hour, it must have played some integral part of her accountant’s magic beyond his understanding. Perhaps a way of tracking which line she was on, or some mathematician’s incantation in the form of arrhythmic _clack-clack-clacking._ Thick bundles of weathered ledgers lay fanned in ordered disarray, but her long fingers trawled the mess with intimate familiarity, for she was its maker and its master. The audit was, in its own way, a kind of soft torture; he could neither leave nor properly keep himself occupied while the numbers were reviewed, and so he receded instead into thoughts of how he had gotten there to begin with.

–

_“…So you see, I cannot deny what must be done. Now that I’ve started, I cannot stop until they’re dead, I’m dead, or both. But I’m a good woman. I’m **good.** I love the gods and I’ve lived decently enough, I think. I give to charity, though maybe not as much as I should have…and I suppose I did help my neighbors on occasion. But now I see the bend in the road and I must…I must…bend with it, or our Lady will snap me like a brittle twig.”_

_His expression remained solemn, his brows hanging heavy enough to cast shade over his eyes. The silence must have been unbearable to her, and he could feel the weight of her hope and expectations pressing into his chest, pinning his back to the chair like a dagger through his thudding heart. He knew what she wanted of him but could not yet unstick his jaw to grant it. Her eyes were glossy and her words were lubricated with three healthy cups of mulled wine that did more to pump life back into her blood than any healer worth their salt. He could feel the sincerity pouring out of her like thick pitch and it did more than touch his heart; it coated it, strangled it, refused to relent from it, wrung every last beat out of it to a dreadful cadence. Before the unbearable quiet could go on even a second longer, she dove back in eagerly._

_“I’ve prayed on it for months since it happened and I believe our Lady is reaching through me, Father. When they did what they did, they left me empty…completely fucking empty—ah, please excuse my language. I’m sorry. Forgive me. I just…I have nothing. And now she is b_ _egging for a vessel to contain her rage and I am that vessel. I have nothing, but I could have something.” He opened his mouth to interject at a natural pause when she beat him to the punch. “Look at me.”_

_He lifted his eyes from his first and only empty cup, his impassive features now carved with grave concern. It was impossible to discern whether it was simply his weak tolerance for the drink or the ethereal firelight glancing off the tears quivering at the rims of her eyelids, but he was stilled in at her beckon, mouth agape._

_“Whatever you’re thinking, whatever it is you’re unsure of…don’t be.” Her quavering tone grew tender and raw. She reached out with a trembling hand and grasped his wrist hard enough to raise his brows at the hidden reservoir of strength. Her whispers grew urgent, in a cadence he hadn’t heard all night, better suited to a prophet drenched in sandalwood than this ragged thing. “This is bigger than either of us. Just say yes already and I will make sure your parish never goes without.”  
_

–

“Right here, around the new year, I believe it was…” she mused abruptly, pearly manicure tapping the creased cover of a spiral-bound book embossed with the quarter for recordkeeping. It was enough to jar him from his reverie with a start. “My audit revealed what I believe to be the beginning of a series of small, but unusual upticks in the coffers. Took quite a bit of digging to get to the bottom of it, so much that I began to second-guess myself…”

“I explained to you before that we had an influx of new parishioners. It was unexpected even to us, as our numbers have held steady year-over-year, but I believe it was our outreach in the rebuilding efforts that helped to repair some bridges that had been badly burned in the past. They saw our work and, I believe, chose to come back to the church to further our charitable endeavors.”

The smile that greeted him was unnerving. The cheerful, pink-haired accountant was out of place, doubly so under the austere stone arches and grim-faced statues of the church grounds, and yet she held an air of possessing a secret that she was dying to share. He held fast in his seat, twisting his handkerchief between his fingers, and stared her down. “We both know that’s not the full story,” she countered softly.

“Well, there were other activities at the time that increased our funds beyond historical amounts, for instance we emptied out the storage cellars…”

A raised hand silenced him, her smile turning apologetic. Pitying, even. “Whatever the truth is, Father, I don’t need to know the extent of it. In fact, it’s best if I don’t; plausible deniability is going to be everyone’s greatest ally in this endeavor, especially given the reputations on the line…” She paused, petal-pink lips pursing with cautious contemplation. “I need to be honest with you, and for you to not be offended by my bluntness. It’s just…if you’re going to launder this much coin, you need someone to show you how to do it right.”

All at once, the precarity of the situation became apparent and his heart seized once in his chest. He slowed his words and spoke carefully. “Let’s say that were true.” A painful pause. “Tell me exactly what it is that you’re suggesting, miss.”

Finally, her expression relented and she sat up a little straighter, palms pressed into the scattered paperwork. It was the first time insecurity registered in her countenance, a candid flash of what must have been some mote of inner desperation. “A job.” The words came with swift, naive honesty. “I _really_ need a job.”


End file.
